“The Thornwood was always hungry. It liked feasting. No one was safe here. Not even if we stayed on the path. We wouldn’t be safe until we reached Westred Academy.”

Surprise! (Double surprise, the story finished on The Thorn Path on Vella is temporarily unavailable, now that I’m planning to revise and release it as an ebook the rest of the post describes how the original release on Vella. Sign up to my newsletter for updates or stay tuned here.)

Lucianna is going to a monster-hunting academy in an alternate world! It’s available on Kindle Vella now.

I am releasing the first three episodes immediately. Then weekly after that. (Sneak Peaks on the blog, of course.)

I know it’s sudden, but why not? I had the idea a while ago and now felt like the right time to release it. So, what is this story? It is called The Thorn Path.

The Thorn Path by Ava Clary

This will be my first time using the Kindle Vella program. It is a platform that lets you release chapters or episodes of an ongoing story and allows for a more immediate connection with readers. You can host polls. Not that I know what to poll anyone about. I’ve written half a “book” of the story, so I know a lot of the world and its secrets, but the story might go off the rails. I expect it will.

If you’re interested in Thorn Path stay tuned for the ebook.

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Excerpt from the first chapter of The Thorn Path by Ava Clary.

Episode 1 Demons are hard to kill and even harder to live with.

I felt sick like I might throw up.

— Don’t you like it? Helena asked me, shoving the plate at my face.

“It’s disgusting. Whatever it is.”

Helena blinked down at the plate. Her black spider eyes, all eight of them, moved in unison. “Blue cheese and beet juice, over a bed of spring greens. The small white nubs are raw carrots from your backyard garden. The color leeched out of them.”

“They look like bugs.”

— What’s wrong Luci? You don’t like salads?

I shoved the plate away again, feeling my stomach shrink. I had to swallow several times, trying not to smell the disgusting sour cheese. The claw on Helena’s right hand clicked open and shut. Helena smiled.

— Or you could eat the bacon.

She pointed to the stovetop.

A pan of half-frozen, half-raw bacon sat in bubbling red juice. I hoped it was juice.

— I glazed it. She sounded so proud.

“Go away,” I snapped, and with a crooked smile, she actually melted into my shadow on the kitchen wall. The plate of salad slipped off the counter and clattered on the floor, cheese, and beet juice splattering across the linoleum. At least the plate didn’t shatter.

When would Helena stop trying to feed me? 

When would the scars on my stomach stop itching?

Never.

I got the broom from the closet and swept up the remains of the salad. 

When I woke up this morning, the house was empty, and a note from Dad. It said: ‘Luci, working overtime tonight, do your run and GO TO SCHOOL’

Overtime, huh? Another hunt, I suspected. He just didn’t want to tell me. Especially since he was going without me. He’s supposed to be training me, but we don’t much anymore.

When Dad’s not around, Helena will manifest herself. She does whenever I’m weak as hell, injured, sick, or sad; when she might have a chance to take control, and most often whenever I don’t want her around — that’s when she appears.

Most people can’t see Helena, even if she is outside my shadow, so I try not to talk to her or look at her. That’s hard when Helena is in a good mood, cracking jokes, and making strange comments and observations about the people around me. She’s a people watcher. Not me, I avoid them. I learned it’s easier that way, better than getting comfortable.

I still had to feed myself something. I didn’t want to collapse when I went out. The cupboards this morning looked pitiful. I tossed out some wheat bread – spots of mold on it. The peanut butter jar had enough for a spoonful. I kept searching and finally broke open a box of graham crackers and used them to eat my yogurt. (All the spoons were dirty and the dishwasher wouldn’t turn on. Dad can fix up this stuff, but maybe I should know how to repair stuff, too. If everything breaks down, we might as well live in the woods, not just a cabin.)

— School? Helena asked, her voice floating in my head.

I snorted.

— Awww. Why not?

Yeah right. No way. Not today. Dad wasn’t around. He can’t make me. Even if he writes it in ALL CAPS. No one else was around to notice whether I did or didn’t. It took over an hour and twenty minutes just to get there — twenty minutes to the bus stop by moped. If I ran it took even longer, and then a forty-five-minute bus ride to Hellgate High School. (Yes, that was the actual name of my school. Although, not an actual Hell Gate, that might explain some teachers there.) It was such a waste of time, going there, being there all day, and then repeating it all again tomorrow. 

— Let’s go. Let’s go. Pleeeeeeze.

Helena’s voice pierced my ears.

-Not today. Today, we’re doing something else.

-Huh? What?

I didn’t answer. Sometimes giving Helena a mystery kept her occupied. 

A normal public school didn’t suit me and Helena.

The other day my Grandmother Arthur sent me a school package. The envelope had the Westred seal on it, a solid black circle with a red border around it, and a fancy white tower in the middle. She wanted me to go to Westred Academy, declared it a family tradition. She even promised to pay the exorbitant tuition, since we could never afford it, but then we’d owe her. I wanted nothing more to do with my mother’s family.

School didn’t matter, not when other things worried me, like my dad’s strange behavior. The early morning exits and late night returns during the last few weeks, and when he was home, he spent a lot of time at his work desk, scribbling notes and diagrams. Only to rip them up and take the garbage out before I could sneak a look. He had more bruises and injuries than usual, drank coffee like a mad scientist, and I found torque stones in his coat pockets. Spell-wrought stones. What the hell! Why? Dad never used spells; didn’t rely on them. He once told me he’d learned a few defensive ones, but nothing as sophisticated as twisting force into stone. Why buy them? He could have asked me to make some. It would have been good practice. 

No. This was something else, something big. A demon hunt he didn’t want me to know about; a hunt dangerous enough for him to buy spells and make diagrams and maps. He was going to do something dangerous and get himself hurt or worse and I’d be stuck at home wondering until I got the call. You know the one. The empty ringing in the night. The world goes stiff and quiet. Not even a crack from Helena. The official-sounding voice on the other line. “Hello, Miss Dalca. I’m afraid I have some bad news about your father, Robert Dalca. I’m sorry to tell you…”

I gulped just thinking about it.

I’d heard such conversations from the side when Dad had to make a few of those calls, speaking to family members. Then he stopped joining big hunts or at least stopped leading them.

I couldn’t stand to be in the house for a second longer. Thinking about all this made me nauseous as if I’d eaten Helena’s salad.

I grabbed my dark brown wool coat. I stuffed my own pockets with some of the torque- stones (Why not?) I also took the last surviving granola bar in the entire house. I needed only two more things to survive in the woods: a lighter (yay for fire), and the military-grade slingshot Dad got me in September on my fifteenth birthday. 

A black rope grip on the handle made the slingshot easy to hold, although it wasn’t much larger than my fist. Steel loops connected the rubber band to the handle, and it only stretched out to elbow length. Nothing special about it really, but I could take down squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, little cabras or fells, or whatever else I came across.

Helena made a gleeful noise as I picked it up. 

— Oh goody, are we going hunting? How delightful. She purred.

I almost wanted to put it back in the drawer just to spite her, but I knew better than that. I don’t go out without my lighter or the slingshot. 

Last winter I left the house with empty pockets. Stupid. Stupid me. I ended up in a ravine, unable to climb out overnight. I couldn’t get a fire going and nearly lost my fingers from frostbite. No food in me for over 48 hours and Helena did not like that. It was not pretty, and trying to explain my injuries was a nightmare, but being stuck in the hospital had made everything ten times worse. No more hospitals for me, thank you.

I headed out the backdoor, letting it slam shut. It really SLAMMED, banging so hard the door frame wobbled and warped. The door itself bent inward, and I frowned, then made sure it sealed shut completely. White light crackled across the surface like the wood was electrified. That’s normal. It was a ward to keep out unwanted visitors. But what wasn’t normal? The feeling I got as I stepped off the back porch and paused on the gravel path. The quiet. The wrong kind of quiet that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

The tree line stood about twenty feet away. Pines and fir trees surrounded our place. Pine needle carpeted the backyard, with some scrappy little weeds trying to take over; no lawn for us to trim, green or otherwise. In the summer, we trained out here. When it got too cold, we spread out the pine needles to dry. Something small made a path through them last night, likely a chipmunk, who scurried from the trees. About halfway across it suddenly changed its mind, and the path veered sharply to one side. I couldn’t see any other footprints or scuff marks.

In the next second, Helena reached out a hand from my shadow and flung me off my feet. I landed hard, face pressed into the gravel path. Over my head came a large white scythe-like blade. The magic would have cut me in half if Helena hadn’t reacted.

My forehead was bleeding. It ran down into my left eye, and I pressed my shirt sleeve to wipe it away. Holding the cut I hoped it stopped bleeding fast.

As I stood up, two figures in black uniforms stepped into the yard, one on each side. They looked my age. I saw the crest on their chest, a familiar red circle cut in half by a white line. Westred? What the hell?

— May I eat them?

Helena made a lip-smacking sound as if their souls looked like cotton candy to her. The sound made my skin crawl.

— Helena, no! Don’t even joke about that. You can’t attack people. 

— Not even the snobs from Westred?

— No!

— Awww.

Without my permission, Helena couldn’t touch a human, body or soul.

— Well… Don’t let them get you, or I’ll have to take over.

Helena’s warning made my heart speed up. She can’t. I won’t let her.

The boy on the left spoke. “Is it her?” He asked. His dark hair reminded me of a razor blade, cut to chin-length. 

Next to him, a girl shoved a green, glowing talisman into her pocket. “She has to be.” She bounced on her feet. In her left hand, she gripped a short sword. A black headband pulled back her blond hair, which sprang out of her head like a sponge.

“Anarchs are a high-level demons. Be on your guard. Don’t listen to anything it says. Don’t hold back either.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.” The blond Westred actually smiled a lethal smile that stretched across her face.

Wait, wait, wait. Did they sense Helena’s presence somehow? Did that talisman work like a scrying spell? What was this? What were they doing here in my backyard? Targeting me?

I narrowed my eyes and braced my feet firmly to the ground. I could retreat into the house.

— Don’t move

Helena snapped at me.

— Are you senseless? They have someone waiting on the roof.

A third one? I glanced upward to the roof but didn’t see anyone. So, they’d surrounded me? 

Not quite.

I lunged, exploding off my right foot into a sprint toward the back fence. To my left, the guy with the razor hair reacted right away, jumping sideways, trying to block me.

Helena wasn’t giving me any edge. Maybe she wanted to see what I could do on my own. I pumped my arms to go faster.